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GAO Investigation Uncovers Political Meddling by Four Top Interior Officials |
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May 21, 2008
CONTACT:Allyson Groff or Blake Androff, 202-226-9019
Washington, D.C. - At an oversight hearing Wednesday of the House Natural Resources Committee, testimony presented by a Congressional investigator deployed by the Committee revealed that four additional highly placed officials at the Interior Department had inappropriately influenced endangered species decision-making.
"A disconcerting picture has emerged of officials working at the highest levels of the Interior Department continuing to tamper with the endangered species program, trumping science with politics. The practice is pervasive and I am convinced that the only remedy is a house-cleaning, post-November," said U.S. Rep. Nick J. Rahall (D-WV), Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.
The hearing was held as a forum for the release of new findings in an ongoing Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation - initiated at the request of Rahall and Reps. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Jay Inslee (D-WA) - into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's (FWS) well-publicized review of the politically tainted endangered species decisions made by former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks Julie MacDonald. MacDonald had resigned in May 2007, following the release of a scathing Inspector General report that revealed that her political tinkering had manipulated scientific decisions under the endangered species program.
"Today we hear that instead of cleaning up its mess, the agency has merely swept it under a rug. And much to my chagrin, we now hear that the agency's well-publicized, post-Macdonald review, ostensibly designed to correct listing and critical habitat decisions - decisions tainted by politics - was a boondoggle; it is fixing nothing. It was too narrow, too fast, and too sloppy," Rahall said.
GAO said that the FWS review was not broad enough and, based on memos, emails and other documents GAO had examined, it found political tampering extending to at least four other Interior Officials. GAO named: Craig Manson, former Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks; Brian Waidmann, current Chief of Staff to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne; Todd Willens, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks; and Randal Bowman, current Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary Lyle Laverty.
"As a result of the inappropriate use of their high-level position within the agency, we can have no confidence that political tinkering with the endangered species program is being addressed any better now by Interior officials than it was under MacDonald's reign," Rahall said.
"As Chairman of this Committee, I am forced to conclude that not only has the endangered species program been sorely politicized, but effort after effort supposedly designed to correct the mishandling of the program by this Administration and its agencies has also been badly bungled. At this point, the best hope for endangered species may simply be to cling to life until after January when this President and his cronies, at long last, hit the unemployment line," Rahall said.
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